unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Dodier wrote:
> I dont think we'd gain much by trying to guess the behaviour of the
> user, because it requires being able to imagine absolutely any
> activity / behaviour (s)he can have. My HMI courses were poor but i've
> been warned that it wasnt an feasible task, back then. We would always
> forget an usecase and disturb someone who's focusing on his work.
>
> That's why i think it would be wise to only delay notifications when
> it is obvious that the user needs his(her) eyes somewhere else. The
> best approach for me consists of making notifications that are easy to
> spot on the screen but that someone focusing on something else can
> easily not notice. I think notify-osd is approaching this state now,
> and we should focus on improving its last bugs, this will likely
> receive more praise from users ;)

+1

I think we can identify a set of "fine motor control" activities, as
Celeste described, where you have "brittle state", like driving your
mouse through a menu or a dropdown listbox. A loss of attention and
consequent slip there is really irritating because you have to "start
over" on the brittle work. We could delay a while on those actions, IMO,
usefully. But beyond that it becomes a mugs game to guess intent.

Mark

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